Reverse Engineering

Overview

This is a two week long project thats goal was to help students get ready for their Capstone project. The assignment was to reverse engineer a cheap digital clock. I worked in a group of 4 and we worked together to create a report and presentation. We had different areas of research. I focused on product redesign and material analysis. I used previous sketches as well as personal observations to ask questions and make my own hypothesis. I then worked with my group to research in detail all of the little details about our clock.

I enjoyed the idea of doing so much research into such a small and seemingly simple product. I never knew that a clock had so many moving pieces. I also learned a lot about Gantt charts and how they made our organization so much better. I plan on using the many tools I learned in this project in the future.

Conclusion

There were a few peaks and failures in our reverse engineering project. One difficulty was taking apart and blueprinting our alarm clock. Although much of this was done before we started the group project we had to recreate and improve on the previous blueprints. We did this by adding in new labels and names collected from research. On the other hand, the research went well. We were able to communicate effectively split up the work evenly and come together to create our overall analysis of the systems of the alarm clock. However, there was little information on our specific alarm clock. Therefore, this took the most time, see Gantt chart.

Furthermore, our product redesign was a key part of our project. We were challenged with combining all of our ideas as well as designing an effective product. After multiple days of critical thinking we proposed the idea of an alarm clock that has a new light, new sound, and new look.

Overall, our reverse engineering product will be a more effective and efficient way to wake someone up peacefully.